Satyam Computer, India’s fourth largest IT services and BPO firm, plans to hire more than eight new employees a day in the next six months with a target to expand its headcount by over 15,000 people by the end of this fiscal — most of which would be fresh college passouts.
“Our organisation has 40,000 people and at the end of the fiscal year (March 2008) we will probably have more than 55,000. Many of the people we bring in will be straight from colleges,” Satyam Computer’s Founder and Chairman Ramalinga Raju said in an interview to McKinsey Quarterly.
The company’s projected 55,000-strong headcount would represent over 10-fold jump in its employee strength of 5,067 in the year 2000. Prior to that, Satyam had a total headcount of 2,255 people in 1998.
The aggressive hiring plan comes amid the concerns that the crisis in the US subprime market and the sharp rise in rupee against the US dollar would eat into the coffers of Indian IT and BPO companies, who have a significant exposure in the US and other Western countries.
In the interview, published in the latest issue of the business journal of global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, Raju said the company’s central mission was to become one of the top IT services companies in the world by 2010.
In July, while announcing the company’s first quarter results, Satyam said its parent company had a total 38,386 associates at the end of March-June quarter, with an addition of 2,716 associates including 1,298 trainees in the quarter.
The number of associates, including the subsidiaries and joint ventures, stood at 42,347.